Blog Info

300th Post

Dan Scott

31 Jan 2025 • 13 min read

300 posts is a major milestone and a good time to look back on past writing and reflect on why I write a blog.

The Ghost blogging platform that I use informs me that this is my 300th post since I started this blog around 11 years ago. My own count is off by 1 or 2 (I think there may have been a post I deleted and re-uploaded to fix a URL or something like that) but we'll go with this as the "official" milestone.

When I reflected on all this writing over a decade plus, these were some points that stood out to me in terms of the value I see in it along with thoughts about the writing process:

The format of this blog has changed somewhat in recent years: my posting is less frequent due to being in a different stage of life (i.e. young kids at home); however, I believe the average length of a post has probably increased.
One way my style has changed is that I have fewer book review posts focused on a single book and make more attempts to put 2 or more books connected by a common theme into conversation with each other.
Reading multiple books on a topic then writing some notes and/or a reaction is a really effective way to learn things. If you only read one book on a topic, you might be overly credulous with respect to that author's personal perspective, but when you read multiple books you can see where the points of agreement are, what the controversial questions are, and in some cases you can even infer a wider space of possible scenarios than a set of authors mention by interpolation or by permutation of options.
Writing a blog provides a nice motivation to keep learning, doing some personal projects, and exploring different ideas.
I'm never sure how many people are reading my posts, so I try to write because I enjoy it or am getting something out of it (like learning) rather than trying to please an audience.
Some ideas bounce around for literally years before I write about them, and I've learned to be patient with that. Waiting until I have the bandwidth to tackle something in a way I'm happy with, or waiting until I find a quote or whatever that can anchor a post that I've had some vague ideas for, but needed a way to tie them together—these things have gotten easier as I've seen them pay off more than once.
In a discussion on Facebook, I made a parenthetical comment related to the value in having a blog:

no one owes you a platform or an audience (and I have a blog that I pay for the hosting of in part because I think it's valuable to be the customer and not the product on at least some of one's communication channels)

One of my goals for 2025 is to try to take advantage of some personal knowledge management (PKM) software; Obsidian is the one I decided to use (as mentioned here). Conveniently, I was already familiar with the Markdown formatting it uses from blogging. Additionally, I've started to copy over some content from my blog to start to populate notes in Obsidian. I think there will be synergies in both directions between blogging and PKM. Blogging on its own provides a lot of the benefits of PKM—having things ranging from ideas or quotes from books to DIY techniques linkable and searchable—although the latter gives the freedom of not making them public.
To end these reflections, I'll share a couple of recent posts I read about the value of longer-form written content for both the writer and the reader:

This situation is not unprecedented. In preindustrial times most people's jobs made them strong. Now if you want to be strong, you work out. So there are still strong people, but only those who choose to be.
It will be the same with writing. There will still be smart people, but only those who choose to be.

and

There are still nuggets of gold on your [social media] feed but the work of panning for them gets ever more tedious. Brain fog sets in quicker now, thanks to the auto-playing micro-videos. The convergent evolution of platforms toward TikTok continues apace. Outside the windows, AI slop proliferates like an endtime weed; it’s now found in almost 20% of websites.

For anyone that started reading my blog more recently, I thought I'd take this opportunity to share some recommended posts (scroll down further for the full archive). In previous milestone posts, I already listed some notable ones from the earlier years of The Drafting Table, so the ones listed here are from the past 100 posts. These are listed in (roughly) the order they were published as opposed to being a ranking:

Reviews of some books about complexity
Travel notes from the Rotterdam area
Dutch water management infrastructure
Technical discussion about biofilms in wastewater treatment
How the science of open channel hydraulics can inform canoeists and kayakers
My attempt at building a hydraulic computer
Some thoughts related to the ideas of Ronald Coase and James C. Scott
Nomography is a method of making graphical figures for solving equations
Review of a book by Vaclav Smil about what we harvest from the biosphere
A couple of book reviews on the history of trade in the Indian Ocean
A DIY project that used tensegrity for the structure
I like travelogues that follow the entire length of a river (I hope to read more like this and maybe take this kind of journey myself someday): these ones were about the Mekong and Yangtze
Comparing (at the dawn of 2023) some geopolitical predictions
On The Abolition of Man, among other things
C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and a perspective on work.
Some context on the prophet Jeremiah
After a decade of reviewing the annual budget of my home province, I wrapped up that series
The launch of my series about industry and related topics (which I still have a couple more posts planned for)

This is a pretty good representation of the range of topics I like to write about.

For the convenience of anyone who wants to browse in The Drafting Table archive, here are links to all 300 (or 299 as the case may be) posts. Some of the older posts that kept a running archive (Year in Review ones, for example—bolded in the list below to visually break it up; by the way, each Year In Review post is also a good source for mentioning my favourite posts from that year) had links broken during a blogging platform software update, so it's good to have a working list all in one place:

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